To the Editor:
The trouble with really long election campaigns is that they run the danger of becoming extremely boring. We have only so much tolerance for the daily surfeit of repetitive hair, clothing combos and conscripted backgrounds of ‘typical Canadians’.
It would help if all of the leaders would grapple with the really hard questions, and give straightforward answers that looked more like thoughtful leadership and less like scripted talking points.
What might help is a Trump-like willingness to speak off the cuff, with passion. It would also help if it were allied with evidence that the hard questions had received some hard thought before the passion was deployed.
For example, this summer Canadians faced the consequences of climate change: raging wildfires, record drought and salmon refusing to return to their natal rivers.
So why are the three major parties still talking as if the sale of Canadian carbon will continue relentlessly in the marketplace? Why are the downstream, offshore impacts of Canadian coal, oil and natural gas combustion not addressed in National Energy Board project assessments? Who is talking about dramatic state investments in high technology and alternate energy infrastructure? Why are new pipelines still broadly endorsed?
How about dealing squarely with job prospects for millennials in a country where 1.35 million people are unemployed in the workforce, and many are fearful of Monday morning layoffs? Too many recent college and university graduates are underemployed in the service sector. In cities like Vancouver and Toronto, they will never own a house. What incentive do they have to vote for old-line parties that offer targeted tax breaks, or public amenity infrastructure construction, or doctrinaire socialism as solutions to problems that have clearly defied old patterns of thought?
Consider the patterned response of the three mainstream parties to the refugee crisis. The right’s calls for retrenchment, with more Syrian bombing added for good measure, is yet another case of looking backwards for solutions. The centre and left have focussed on reintroducing past responses to the Hungarian victims of communism, the Vietnamese boat people, and the victims of Idi Amin’s Ugandan reign of terror as plausible contemporary solutions.
Social media have been full of stories, research and contextualizing on many new causes of refugee flight: a decade of atypical drought in the fertile crescent, driving hundreds of thousands of farmers and their families into cities incapable of producing alternate employment; sectarian warfare aided and abetted by global powers eager to suppress their minorities’ aspirations of autonomy; the wide-scale leasing of African continent arable lands for food security in Asia, and a pervasive lack of hope by the young that existing systems of governance and economic management will ever make anything better.
If there is one certain predictor of impending societal stress and warfare, it is the large numbers of young men who see no economic future. They have in our global history often been subject to the power whims of clerics, tyrants and capitalists, each of whom have their own needs for exploiting young armies to private ends. God forbid this continues.
So how about, in the four weeks remaining in the lengthy federal campaign of 2015, we ask our aspiring federal parties and their leaders to tell us just what the ‘next economy’ might look like? This will be the beginning of the post-carbon economy, which relies on technology start-ups to drive employment and human happiness. It will require a significant departure from what was and what is. Simply muddling through won’t cut it, either.
So far in this campaign, the only party coming to grips with any of this is the Green Party. As early adopters, they are prodding us forward. The cruel reality is that the old parties are still playing the songs that the electorate likes to hear. The citizens deserve better, don’t we?
Mike Robinson has been CEO of three Canadian NGOs: the Arctic Institute of North America, the Glenbow Museum, and the Bill Reid Gallery.
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